Heritage and Authenticity: Cultural Specifics and Governance Challenges

Heritage, an important tourism resource, has witnessed gradual patrimonialisation in the post-modern world, posing great management and governance challenges to tourism destinations. Among different research topics, heritage authenticity merits special academic focus these days. China, an ancient culture with modern economy, is symptomatic of the friction between urbanization and heritage conservation, thus calling special attention in this regard. This paper, by situating heritage in its historical and cross-cultural context, attempts to illustrate how cultural interpretation of heritage as well as state policy evolution contribute to the current heritage practices and conflicts, which in turn pose great governance challenges. An in-depth discussion on this issue allows for a reexamination of heritage/patrimonialisation and its authenticity/authentication, without being entangled in the convenient evaluation between real and fake on the one hand, and contributes to the sustainable governance debates perplexing tourism destinations on the other.status: publishe